Hollywood hoopla for Kobe Bryant

When Spike Lee felt compelled to make a documentary on basketball after watching the 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, he did not look beyond Kobe Bryant.

“For one game they had 17 cameras focussed on Zinedine Zidane, the effect was amazing and I thought this would work for basketball,” Lee explained. “To entice Kobe, I showed him the Zidane film because he grew up in Italy and football is one of his first loves. He watched the documentary and said, ‘Let’s do it’. Our intention was to make a film in which we can see the game from the player’s perspective and what better perspective than someone as driven as Kobe?”

Kobe Doin’ Work premiered recently in New York, while the Zidane of the National Basketball Association was more than 2,000 miles away in Salt Lake City engaged in Game 4 of LA Lakers’ first round playoff against Utah Jazz.

Like Zidane, his reputation is that of a flawed genius. With Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, the Lakers won three NBA titles in succession from 2000 but have failed to land the big prize since O’Neal’s acrimonious departure in 2004. A collision of egos between two of the NBA’s biggest names was at the root of their parting. That season Bryant was also accused of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old concierge at a resort in Edwards, Colorado, and a four years-to-life sentence loomed before prosecutors dropped all charges when his alleged victim refused to testify.

“Either you persevere and come out of the situation a better person or you’re going to let it drown you,” the married father of two daughters said recently. “I’m not the type to just roll over, so you might as well make the best of it, try to come out of it and learn from it.” Yet the dark images evoked by these events — and the damning conclusion of Todd Boyd, author of Young, Black, Rich and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion and the Transformation of American Culture, that “saying Kobe has street cred is like saying Dick Cheney has street cred” — are difficult to reconcile with the urbane personality he demonstrated when he wrote a first-person story for Dime, the hoops fanzine.

“I never felt like I deserved to be part of our tradition because I grew up in Italy,” he wrote of his relationship with the black community, mirroring some of Barack Obama’s thoughts in Dreams From My Father. “I never truly believed my own people wanted to identify with me.”

During NBA All-Star weekend, in the presence of Muhammad Ali and in the first month after the election of America’s first black president, he expanded on these thoughts. “I didn’t feel part of the everyday struggle that African-Americans were going through because I wasn’t subject to racial discrimination or racial profiling or inner-city streets and everything that it entailed,” he insisted. “How am I going to identify with that when I grew up in an environment that didn’t see colour and where there was no racial discrimination? It wasn’t there in Italy. Everybody just had a good time with each other. So when I came back to the United States, I thought, ‘How can people look at me to be a leader for this group or this generation when I don’t have a voice that pertains to that?’”

Ultimately, as Lee’s film depicts, Bryant is one of the most driven performers in American sports. “Kobe wants it so badly that he rubs an awful lot of people the wrong way,” said Lakers consultant Tex Winter. “They’re not willing to understand what’s inside the guy.” Perhaps at his core he is still the same kid who used to get up at 5am to go to practise with his father Joe, a professional basketball player in Italy and the US. He will be around a lot longer, too. Kobe doin’ work has unfinished business.